The modern mission movement of the nineteenth century was the
beginning of a new era in mission work. Before the 1800’s the church felt its
call to missions consisted only of reaching the lost with the message of
salvation. As the new century dawned the social and political climate began to
change the missionary momentum came to a standstill. For the first time church
was challenged to consider the social needs of the day. This challenge led to a
new perception of missions that continue change the face of the mission work even
today.

Age of the modern
missionary movement

The beginning of the first era in the modern history
of the missionary movement can be traced back to 1792 with the publication of a
book entitled An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for
the Conversion of the Heathens, written by the 31-year-old Baptist minister and
former shoemaker William Carey. Carey explained why involvement in missionary
work is so essential. (He was criticised severely by church leaders in England
because of his conviction that "the nations of the world need Christ"
and that it was the responsibility of the Christian leadership to make sure
that "heathens" were exposed to the Gospel.) The book also provides
readers with a brief history of the Christian missionary movement dating from
the Apostolic era, as well as practical solutions on how to reach the world
with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Carey's book caused an upheaval among some
Protestant Groups. In Kettering (England) a new missionary organisation - the
Baptist Missionary Society - was founded under whose auspices Carey worked in
India from 1793. He was involved in missionary work in India for more than
forty years. New missionary organizations were launched in England, Scotland,
the Netherlands and America soon afterwards. Their aim was to send out
missionaries and to motivate congregations and prayer groups to establish
support networks for these workers. During the same time, Protestant
missionaries from Europe and America were sent out to the New World - primarily
Asia and Africa. They settled in the coastal regions and concentrated on
reaching groups living in these areas. Many missionaries - especially those
working in Africa died trying to fulfil their calling. During the first era and
over a period of sixty years more than 90% of the missionaries who worked in
Africa died within two years of arrival on the continent due to tropical
diseases such as malaria.[1]

The positive effects of
the movement.

The moral crusade

In the nineteenth century Christians saw many
injustice in their society and they tried to correct them. By Gods power, they
wanted to change the world in number of ways.

Reforms

Preachers denounced the evils from the pulpits,
newspapers printed and large meetings increased the pressure for change.
Christians rallied to support many causes such as securing legal protection for
women winning the right for women to vote.

In India William carry stood against the practice of
Sati and encouraged education for women in India. The worked for liberation
from prostitution alcohol and slavery.

Missionary
work

The concern
of American Christians were not limited to their own country. Many of them were
challenged by the story of Adoniram Judson to enter foreign missionary service.
Many new missionary societies were established, and all denomination had
mission boards to promote missionary support.

Urban
needs

The rapidily growing cities posed the greatest challenge.
Some of the churches established missions in the urban centres. They offered
aid to the poor and alternatives to drinking and gambling, and they included
aggressive evangelism. The missionaries established hospitals, orphanages and
schools.

Personal
holiness

With so much of wickedness in society, many churches
emphasized the message that only answer was personal holiness. Holy lives that
would , in turn produce a holy society. This gave rise to the holiness movement
which seemed to touch all churches.

Bible
translations

Bible was translated to many native languages. By
the time of the death of William Carey in 1834 he translated some parts of the
Bible into 40 Indian languages.

Slave
trade

English evangelicals fought vigorously to abolish
the slave trade. The British Parliament made slavery illegal in British land.

The
negative effects of the movement

Social
Ministries

Churches became institutional in an attempt to
provide programs such as gymnasiums libraries, clinics, and social rooms for
all aspects of life. It sometimes addressed the physical needs and did not
demand a new-birth experience

Theological
revolutions

There were major changes in the way some theologians
understood the nature of Christianity. They declared that advances of science
and historical studies demanded a change in Christianity. This theological revolution
included Darwinism, liberalism and biblical criticism.

Role
of different individuals in the Missionary movement

William Carey

It was
in 1793 that Carey went to India. At first his wife was reluctant to go so
Carey set off to go nevertheless, but after two returns from the docks to
persuade her again, Dorothy and his children accompanied him. They arrived with
a Dr. Thomas at the mouth of the Hooghly in India in November, 1793. There were
years of discouragement (no Indian convert for seven years), debt, disease,
deterioration of his wife's mind, death, but by the grace of God and by the
power of the Word, Carey continued and conquered for Christ!

When
he died at 73 (1834), he had seen the Scriptures translated and printed into
forty languages, he had been a college professor, and had founded a college at
Serampore. He had seen India open its doors to missionaries, he had seen the
edict passed prohibitingsati(burning widows on the funeral pyres of
their dead husbands), and he had seen converts for Christ.[2]

BishopSamuel Ajayi Crowther

Ajayi was in his 12th year when
he was captured, along with his entire village, by Muslim Fulani slave raiders
in 1821 and sold to Portuguese slave traders. Before leaving port, his ship was
boarded by a Royal Navy ship under the command of Captain Henry Leeke, and
Crowther was taken to Freetown, Sierra Leone and released. While there, Crowther
was cared for by the Anglican Church Missionary Society, who taught him
English. He converted to Christianity, was baptized by Rev. John Raban, and
took the name Samuel Crowther in 1825.

In 1841 Crowther was selected to
accompany the missionary James Frederick Schön on an expedition along the Niger
River. The goal of the expedition was to spread commerce, teach agricultural
techniques, spread Christianity, and help end the slave trade. Following the
expedition, Crowther was recalled to England, where he was trained as a
minister and ordained by the bishop of London. He returned to Africa in 1843
and with Henry Townsend, opened a mission in Abeokuta, in today's Ogun State,
Nigeria.

Rev. Dr. Crowther began translating the bible into the
Yoruba language and compiling a Yoruba dictionary.[3]

Hudson Taylor

Taylor was born to James and Amelia
Taylor, a Methodist couple fascinated with the Far East who had prayed for
their newborn, "Grant that he may work for you in China." Years
later, a teenage Hudson experienced a spiritual birth during an intense time of
prayer as he lay stretched, as he later put, "before Him with unspeakable
awe and unspeakable joy." He spent the next years in frantic preparation,
learning the rudiments of medicine, studying Mandarin, and immersing himself
ever deeper into the Bible and prayer.

His ship arrived in Shanghai, one of five
"treaty ports" China had opened to foreigners following its first
Opium War with England. Almost immediately Taylor made a radical decision (as
least for Protestant missionaries of the day): he decided to dress in Chinese
clothes and grow a pigtail (as Chinese men did). His fellow Protestants were
either incredulous or critical.

Taylor, for his part, was not happy with
most missionaries he saw: he believed they were "worldly" and spent
too much time with English businessmen and diplomats who needed their services
as translators. Instead, Taylor wanted the Christian faith taken to the
interior of China. So within months of arriving, and the native language still
a challenge, Taylor, along with Joseph Edkins, set off for the interior,
setting sail down the Huangpu River distributing Chinese Bibles and tracts.

When the Chinese Evangelization Society,
which had sponsored Taylor, proved incapable of paying its missionaries in
1857, Taylor resigned and became an independent missionary; trusting God to
meet his needs. The same year, he married Maria Dyer, daughter of missionaries
stationed in China. He continued to pour himself into his work, and his small
church in Ningpo grew to 21 members. But by 1861, he became seriously ill
(probably with hepatitis) and was forced to return to England to recover.[4]

Florence Selina Harriet Young (1856-1940),

Florence Selina
Harriet Young (1856-1940), missionary, was born on 10 October 1856 at Motueka,
near Nelson, New Zealand, fifth child of Henry Young, farmer, and his wife
Catherine Anne, née Eccles, both Plymouth Brethren from England

Settling in Sydney in 1878, after the death of her parents Florence
moved in 1882 to Fairymead, a sugar plantation near Bundaberg, Queensland, run
by two of her brothers. With timidity, she began to hold prayer meetings for
planters' families and, with one assistant, established the Young People's
Scriptural Union which eventually attracted 4000 members. Her attentions were
increasingly devoted to the Melanesian sugarworkers whose responsiveness to
kindness she applauded and whose 'heathen' customs and 'addictions' to 'white
men's vices' she abhorred. Asking that God instruct 'the teacher and the
scholars', she conducted classes in pidgin English, using pictures, rote
biblical phrases and a chrysalis to explain the resurrection.

Under Miss Young's guidance, the Queensland Kanaka Mission was formally
established at Fairymead in 1886 as an evangelical, non-denominational church.
Relying on unsolicited subscriptions and stressing 'salvation before education
or civilization', it spread to other plantations and won considerable approval.
The Q.K.M. aimed to prepare the Melanesians for membership of established
Christian churches after their repatriation and employed paid missionaries and
members of Florence's extended family. Reassuring in its message of hope, its open-air
hymn singing and its mass baptisms in local rivers, at its height in 1904-05
the Q.K.M. engaged nineteen missionaries and 118 unpaid 'native teachers', and
claimed 2150 conversions. As she embraced departing converts, Florence exhorted
them: 'No forget 'im Jesus'.[5]

The
effect of Theological revaluationon the growth of the church

Darwinism

During the life time of Charles Darwin he published
a number of books that claimed to show how life developed or evolved into its
present forms. According to Darwin’s theory, the most fit of species survive
and the week are destroyed. Science man is obliviously the most highly evolved
animal, he is assumed to meagrely a sophisticated ape.

The idea of evolution have challenged Christianity
continually until modern times. Christians saw the theory of evolution is a
direct challenge to the view that man is created by a wise and a loving god the
creator. The indirect impact of evolution
, however was even greater then the direct challenge. The philosophy behind Darwin’s
theory was that man was getting better and better.

Many new inventions of man proved this fact.
Christianity the highest of all religions must also be a product of evolution
which some day will surpass all religion.

Theological liberalism,

Sometimes
known asProtestant Liberalism, is a theological movement rooted in
the early 19th century German Enlightenment, notably in the philosophy of
Imanuel Kant and the religious views of Friedrich Schleiermacher. It is an
attempt to incorporate modern thinking and developments, especially in the
sciences, into the Christian faith. Liberalism tends to emphasize ethics over
doctrine and experience over Scriptural authority. While essentially a 19th
century movement, theological liberalism came to dominate the American mainline
churches in the early 20th century. Liberal Christian scholars embraced and
encouraged the higher biblical criticism of modern Biblical scholarship.

Protestant liberal thought in its most
traditional incarnations emphasized the universal Fatherhood of God, the
brotherhood of man, the infinite value of the human soul, the example of Jesus,
and the establishment of the moral-ethical kingdom of God on Earth. It has
often been relativistic, pluralistic, and non-doctrinal.[6]

Communism

Lenins victory in the famous October Revelution of
1917 in Russia established a new system of government controlled by the
Communist. Private property including church property was confiscated. The
communist government emptied Monasteries and church building turned into
museums and gymnasiums. Thousands of priests and monks were sent to prision
camps were they died. All evangelism and religious education was banned.

Conon

Conclusion

The purpose of the modern mission was to create an
avenue by which the protestant Church could attempt to fulfil the great
commission. William Carey’s vision caught on and through the midst of
persecution, war, social and political unrest there were men and women ready to
pick up the torch and keep the fire lit. In spite of disagreements and setbacks
the modern missionary Movement prevailed, exploding churches, converting
thousands, and reaching the poor and dying in their greatest need.

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